Uno Dois Drei: Pêdra Costa ? Seduction at a Crossroads Event

?Seduction at a crossroads? is a new performance of Pêdra Costa informed by the technologies of queer bodies and spiritual knowledge. This piece involves codes of seduction from a queer body from the global South, showing and criticizing the concept of beauty in heteronormative society. It does so by using the concepts and embodiment of pharmacopornography by Paul B. Preciado. This work is based on Pomba-giras, female spirits that incorporate mediums in the Umbanda, a syncretic Brazilian religion, heritage from the artist’s mother. Those spirits work on love, seduction and sex, and the crossroads are the space to offer gifts for them. At the same time, Pêdra talks in pajubá-deutsch, a language between pajubá, created by trans women in Brazil to protect themselves that mixed Yoruba and Portuguese, and more acknowledged today, and Deutsch, the German language. Pajubá-deutsch is based on the concept of mestiza and cultural hybridity from Gloria Anzaldúa’s work on intersectional difference in order to articulate a politics of coalition against the exclusion of alterity.

The exhibition is part of the program UNO, DOIS, DREI? AN EXHIBITION IN THREE INSTALLMENTS a Mz* Baltazar?s Lab curatorial project in collaboration with Artistic Bokeh in MuseumsQuartier. For this exhibition series Patricia J. Reis and Anna T. have invited artists focusing on language in a multitude of ways. Being based in a place that has been so divided in the context of immense sociopolitical changes, while becoming more multi-cultural, the curators wanted to look into language as a technology of communicating, connecting, and coming together. The exhibition series examines the visual language of colonialism (and who or what becomes illegal), the human and machine language and its threshold of function and dysfunction, and the embodied language of a queer migrant body that opens up and connects with other bodies and spirits alike. Mz* Baltazar?s curatorial viewpoint brings together artists from different media and backgrounds that speak to the diversity of the creative hub that is Vienna. Mz* Baltazar?s Lab further aims at highlighting the lengthy process of artistic practice as research in the framework of social and political themes, such as migration, Eurocentrism, cyborgs, queerness, and the overarching theme of language. We are happy to present Mariel Rodríguez, Isabella Kohlhuber, and Pêdra Costa in a series of exhibitions running from August to December 2016 at the space of Artistic Bokeh in the MQ?s Electric Avenue.